China’s apparently unceasing efforts to lead the world in every conceivable field continued on Sunday after engineers in the western region of Xinjiang began construction of what is claimed will be the largest capacity power line on the planet.
The 800 kilovolt (kv) ultra-high voltage power transmission line is being built by …

Re: Power Calcs

Re: Power Calcs

Whilst we're here, 8 million kW is a clumsy way of writing 8GW.

My guess is that whoever wrote the English-language press release doesn't actually know what a gigawatt is. That's fair enough, I suppose. I haven't a clue what it is in Chinese. If only there was a "tech news" website which aggregated all these press releases and rewrote them with the proper engineering terminology...

El Reg Alternative Units

A hamster is reasonably capable of 0.15 Watts, and assuming a hamster can only be relied on to run for 3 hours a day... by my calculations (i.e. 1 Watt = 53.33 Hamsters) the El Reg Alternative Unit measurement here would be:

Re: NO FUCKING P IN HAMSTER!!!!!

Damn I'm probably guna be offered sweets and kidnapped by some of you lot at this rate! Taken back to your secrete underground, tin foil lined, tech dungeon! Damn stranger danger getting me into trouble again!!!!!

Russians tried a 1MV delivery system nearly 20 years ago

Russians tried a 1MV delivery system nearly 20 years ago from Ekibastuz to the European part of the USSR. It was trumpeted very loud and there were even articles describing the designs in their pop-sci magazines (Nauka i Zhizn if memory serves me right).

IIRC, end of the day it was not worth it so they ended up running a couple of 600Kv (which is their de-facto large capacity standard anyway). I may be wrong of course.

In any case - this is _NOT_ earth shattering, it is the usual "Chinese copy Russian or Western tech at reduced capacity and claim world first".

Re: It's kV not kv, BTW

Not that high power

A standard dual circuit 3 phase 4 conductor 400kV line as used in the main transmission lines in the UK can carry 1kA per conductor for a total power of over 6.7GW. The China link is high voltage but not very high power given the voltage.

The high voltage is probably to reduce the amount of aluminum (or copper) needed for the line (doubling the voltage halves the amount of conductor needed).

Re: Not that high power

Very long distance though. If you use cable materials whose cost is linearly proportional to distance, losses will also be linearly proportional. If your transformers (and rectifiers if DC is used) can handle higher voltages, and if this didn't lose more energy through corona discharge, doubling the voltage would quadruple the capacity of the line without increasing losses which are proportional to current.

Re: Not that high power

Might be pretty good at thwarting copper thieves, too, no? A would-be-copper-theif-inverted-ito-a-crispy-critter every 200 km might cast the country into a time-warping brownout, hehehe.... Unless these things are very, very buried....

If any get to within the dam-burst zones of the Three Gorges Dams, and got flooded, what might that do to the system overall? Would breakers (or their equivalent devices) be tripping all over the country? IF hey have bad luck restoring power at night, that side of the Globe might look like a bicyclist's strobe to any *nauts who happen to be flying over (assuming the light show penetrates any then-current pollution).

But, it got me wondering whether this is a backdoor prototype for Blue Energy (lol!), to energize a Project Genesis.

Seriously, could this be tapped in to by nuclear reactors later if that 2 trillion tons of coal reserves gets sucked up or is so toxic that burning it becomes untenable? What kind of conversion systems would be candidates to supplant coal plants if/when it becomes necessary?

"We can reduce 317,000 tons of sulfur dioxide and 267,000 tons of nitrogen oxide which would otherwise be produced during the transportation," quote comes from, though without stating what this is compared to, these figures are meaningless - 800kV Vs. 400kV? 800kV Vs. 1000V?